Saturday, September 20, 2008

This semester is really exciting for both the San Jose State and myself. With an increased focus and commitment to improving the animation at San Jose State, the department has set up world class partnerships which brings us a world class education. I just wanted to highlight a couple projects we're starting in those classes.

In order to get better at 3D animation, I'm taking a couple different classes. The first is focused just on 3D mechanics and animation itself. We're starting with basic tests but ramping up quickly. We'll have the chance to go back and fix up the test to get them portfolio ready at the end of the semester which is great because our animation eye will be more tuned by then.

The first job was the classic ball bounce:

I like how this turned out, but the staging makes it hard to see because I had to zoom out so far to see it all.

The second job was a sack pantomime. We used a rig off of highend3D and it was pretty good for the most part once we removed the dynamics which tried to animate parts for us. The knees bulge quite a bit and that's a product of poor knee controls, but the general feel is still there. Here's my take on the sack pantomime:

There are a lot of funny shapes going on in the turn and the run which I need to address. I've also gotten a critique on ACME (www.acmeanimation.org) about the weight shift being off so I will address that when I address the other issues.

That's all for now, I'll talk about the other class in the next post where we're working on a 5 week project.